In recent years, multimedia communications over the Internet and other wired and/or wireless communications networks have gained increased popularity. For example, such multimedia communications can be performed within the context of video conferencing systems, in which multipoint control units (MCUs) are employed to facilitate collaboration among groups of conference participant devices by performing various functions including mixing, synchronizing, encoding, decoding, and transcoding video and/or audio data bitstreams generated by the respective conference participant devices.
In such video conferencing systems, successful transmissions of multimedia data from the MCUs (also referred to herein as the “data senders”) to the conference participant devices (also referred to herein as the “data receivers”) over communications networks generally require sufficient bandwidth and low latency for minimal packet loss. Such transmissions of multimedia data from the data senders are typically based on the real-time transport protocol (RTP), and delivery of such multimedia data to the data receivers is typically monitored using the real-time transport control protocol (RTCP). For example, a data receiver that receives multimedia data in the form of RTP packets from a data sender can provide reception quality feedback information to the data sender in one or more RTCP report packets.
Multimedia communications can be problematic, however, particularly when transmissions of multimedia data are performed over communications networks such as the Internet. For example, when video conferencing is performed over the Internet, various conference participant devices may be subjected to different levels of network congestion, which can result in reduced bandwidth, increased latency, and ultimately increased packet losses, which can severely degrade the multimedia quality of experience (QoE) for conference participants. Moreover, conventional approaches that employ RTCP report packets for monitoring the delivery of multimedia data have heretofore been incapable of reliably achieving the QoE generally desired and/or required for multimedia data transmissions.